biography
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The Rumpus Interview with Lucy Jane Bledsoe
Lucy Jane Bledsoe discusses her latest book, A Thin Bright Line, uncovering the remarkable story of her aunt, and illuminating history through the lens of imagination.
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Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet by Terese Svoboda
Julie Enszer reviews Terese Svoboda’s Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet today in Rumpus Poetry.
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The Big Idea: Dawn Tripp
Dawn Tripp discusses Georgia, her new novel based on Georgia O’Keeffe’s life, O’Keeffe’s distancing herself from feminism, and balancing biography with fiction.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Janice N. Harrington
Janice N. Harrington on her new collection Primitive and critiquing the use of “primitive” to describe African American folk art.
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Hitler’s Ghostwriter
New evidence uncovered by history professor and researcher Thomas Weber indicates that Hitler himself wrote the 1923 biography Adolf Hitler: His Life and His Speeches, which is credited to Baron Adolf Victor von Koerbe. Weber’s research implies that Hitler had designs…
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Beyond “The Lottery”
Although best known for “The Lottery”, there was much more to Shirley Jackson’s work—and life. At the New York Times, Charles McGrath reviews of Ruth Franklin’s new biography A Rather Haunted Life, and explores Franklin’s journalistic yet personal take on the woman who…
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The Rumpus Interview with William Hjorstberg
William Hjorstberg talks about his new book, the heady writing days in Livingstone, Montana, being a “Hollywood whore,” and the finer points of Richard Brautigan.
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The Rumpus Interview with Terese Svoboda
Poet Terese Svoboda talks about her biography of the socialist-anarchist firebrand and modernist poet Lola Ridge, Anything That Burns You, and remembers a time when the political was printed in newspapers.
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The Lives of Others
We’ve always been fascinated by the possibility of understanding the person behind the work. For Lit Hub, Heller McAlpin examines a long tradition of writing about writers: There’s a special frisson of pleasure in reading about writers’ early struggles when…
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Don’t Quit Your Day Job
But dip into nearly any of Stevens’s poems, to the last, and be braced by a voice like none other, in its knitted playfulness and in its majesty. For most of his life, Wallace Stevens worked a day job as…
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Like Exile
Stuck at home with numerous young children, with a husband who had little interest in her work and actively discouraged her intellectual pursuits, Howe rebelled in small ways. In the late 1840s, Howe secretly began to write a novel. She…
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Finding Kafka
Was Franz Kafka really a tortured neurotic writer? A new biography shows a different side of the surreal German writer: He loved beer and slapstick. He undertook a fitness regime popularized by a Danish exercise guru. He tried to cheat on…